The winners of the UK section of the world’s biggest photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments have just been announced, with the judges awarding fIrst prize to this stunning image of Gloucester Cathedral cloisters taken by Christopher JT Cherrington.

Chris has written a short blog post on the Wiki Loves Monuments website explaining how he took his winning image.

The 2018 contest

Wiki Loves Monuments is the world’s biggest photographic competition, with a total of 260,607 images submitted to the 2018 competition from all over the world. In the UK, 13,185 images taken by over 500 photographers were entered. The competition aims to gather high quality, openly-licensed images of historic sites from all over the world.

The contest is an incredible opportunity to document and preserve our heritage for future generations, and this year saw a particular focus on the capture of internal shots, as well as of those sites which were lacking a freely-licensed image in Wikidata, the knowledge base which sits behind Wikipedia.

Among this year’s winners are three castles (all in Wales), two lighthouses (New Brighton and Bass Rock), and one museum (Arbroath).

This year saw a marked increase in submissions from Scotland, with over double the number of entries submitted this year than in 2017. Wikimedia UK worked with Historic Environment Scotland’s publicly-available database of listed buildings and scheduled monuments to add over 27,000 new eligible items to Wikidata, vastly improving the coverage of Scotland.

PIctures submitted to this year’s contest are already being used to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and Wikimedia UK would like to extend their warmest thanks to all those who submitted entries, helping to significantly improve access to this knowledge.

The top ten UK winners now go forward to the international judging stage of the contest, where they will compete against the best images from some 55 other countries. The first, second and third placed UK winners receive £250, £100, and £50 respectively, with seven Highly Commended winners receiving £25 each.

Additional prizes have been awarded for the best three images from England, from Scotland and from Wales. Archaeology Scotland has also sponsored a special prize for the best photograph of a site in Scotland: a free 1-year membership including the Archaeology Scotland Magazine as well as access to their learning resources.

One of the competition’s judges noted that the quality and variety of images submitted continues to increase:

“Each year the standard of entries for Wiki Loves Monuments UK rises. Browsing through the long list of almost 250 images was made enjoyable and easy because of the quality of the images and the variety of locations from across the British Isles on display, narrowing it down to a shortlist of just 10 was a much harder process. It is a real pleasure to have been involved in the judging of this competition and to see the skill and dedication of the winning photographers recognised.”

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Comments

This post currently has 3 responses

Congratulations to the winners and pleased to see the increase for Scotland. Thanks to the volunteers who organised and judged the event. (No mean task).

Could someone explain why N.Ireland was dropped? I’m guessing either poor quality pix or not enough people as there were hundreds of pictures posted. I think that without explanation then it sends a message to anyone planning to enter next year if the prize offers are conditional.

Hi Roger, According to the competition rules (https://www.wikilovesmonuments.org.uk/judging-and-prizes) “Prizes will be awarded subject to there being sufficient entries (greater than 1000) in each category” – which didn’t happen this year in NI unfortunately. We hope that there will be more activity in NI in future!